As I have mentioned, I seem to be extra sleepy lately.

And as usual, this bothers me. I don’t want to sleep all the damned time. I want to be awake and energetic so I can have lots of fun.

And I can’t help but wonder at what is causing this rise in somnolence. It could be something physical. I am not a healthy man and I have a number of conditions which might lead to my needing a lot of sleep.

Or at the very least, to my not having much choice but to get it.

But for me, there is always the psychological angle to consider. I have a long history of using sleep as a way to not have to cope with reality at all – hence my joke about sleep being death without the commitment.

Meaning being asleep is the closest thing you can get to being dead (and therefore not having to cope) without actually dying and thus no longer having being alive and awake as an option.

Because I don’t want to die. I just want to rest. I want to completely stop all the wheels spinning in my head and know the bliss of oblivion for a while so that I can do a cold fresh reboot my consciousness without all the bits and pieces of miscellaneous thoughts and emotions fogging up my mind.

Just like rebooting your computer, I want to defrag my mind, god dammit.

And I don’t get that from sleep. My sleep apnea probably plays a big part in that, but that’s a whole thing I don’t want to get into right now.

And I am positive my fractured psychology plays a big part in it too. I have so much going on in my massive mind at any one time that it is no wonder that my mind can’t ever truly catch up and thus let me truly rest.

And if I ever did catch up, my mind would likely generate a whole lot of new bullshit to process just so it can maintain a feeling of normalcy.

We instinctively want to keep things “normal” ever if normal is terrible. Sort of a “better the hell you know than this scary new ‘heaven’ thing that’s so damned weird.

Plus there’s my hypervigilance to contend with. You can never truly relax and rest when a very deep part of you feels like it constantly has to stay alert to handle the dangers it feels lurking all around you.

You can’t sleep if you don’t feel safe, is what I am saying.

And I do not feel safe. Ever. Even when I am all alone here in my bedroom and safely ensconced in the artificial world of my computer, that deep part of me feels hunted.

And I don’t know what to do about that. I try to send calm, soothing updates to that scared little animal inside me telling it that the danger is long gone and we are perfectly safe now so it can finally relax.

But it’s been in raw nerved paranoia for far too long for that. It treats any attempt to calm it down as if someone is trying to trick it into lowering its guard and therefore trying to bring it to harm, and rejects it.

It’s frustratingly self=sustaining like that.

Clearly no form of reason or logic can penetrate such a dee and primitive paranoia. It does not come from a place of reason, but from something far deeper and older that has been there since the rape that shattered me.

And I was four when that happened.

Only emotion can penetrate that deep. This part of me would need to feel safe before it can relax and let go and let me, at long last, get some real rest.

And I don’t think I can find an external source of that feeling of safety. Not with these mile high social barriers all around me.

So I think it is something I have to simply grant myself, arbitrarily, without the need for justification. Not everything needs to be logically contiguous. It is perfectly fine to throw out the rulebook and do what needs to be done regardless.

Or so I keep telling myself.

Repeat until believed.

More after the break.

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The social world

You know what? I’m happier there.

And that’s a revelation I really need to put down in words and explore because I need to start overwriting my bad old socially broken tapes with new, fresh, socially functional tapes as soon as possible.

Not only do I not have any good reason to fear being in the social world, I have plenty of reason to think I could very well thrive there.

After all, I am a funny, charming, lovable, and very witty fellow. I am sensitive and very understanding and kind, and I genuinely care about people and want them to do well.

In other words,. I’m one heck of a guy.

And being social makes me happy. That’s why our Sunday dinner at Denny’s is the highlight of my week. For a couple of hours, I get to hang out with my friends and chat and relax and be sociable for a change.

Beats the hell out of being cooped up in this fucking bedroom and whiling away the hours playing video games all the god damned time.

No matter how good the game is, it’s still not as good as being with people

This brings me to a familiar pivot point : am I really introverted, or am I just a broken extrovert afraid to make the human connections I so desperately want and need?

And it’s not just Denny’s. Any time I am leaving the social world to return to my lonely little cell, I feel sad. I feel like I am leaving the warm, vibrant, living world to return to my musty sepulcher and go back to being one of the living dead.

The image that pops up regularly at that time is one of a ventriloquist’s dummy whom everybody loves at their shows but what nobody knows is how sad and broken he feels when he has to go back into his box every night and be all alone and scared when he wants to stay out and be with people.

“I don’t want to go back in the box. ” I think to myself as I part ways with Joe and Julian and go back to my bedroom.

And this confuses me because I have spent such a long time thinking of myself as this ,malfunctioning robot who hides away from the world and flees social situations.

So shouldn’t a release from being social make me happy?

And it does. But it also doesn’t.

It does make The Trog happy. That side of me is always happy to flee the light and go back to squatting in its deep dark dank cave away from everyone else.

But it doesn’t make the actually still healthy part of me happy at all. It wants to stay around people and continue to shine and sparkle and feel connected to the real world and all who live in it.

The important thing for me to remember and hang on to is that I am at my happiest when I am around the right kind of people, and there is no reason why I can’t be just as happy around “normal” people too.

I just need to be around them enough to stimulate me to do all that social development that I was supposed to do back when I was a teen.

Turns out, this road ends where they all end : with me needing to grow the hell up.

And I want to, But I am scared.

Boy, does that sound familiar.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.